The (first) one that got away
We were smitten. We’d seen a house online, and it looked perfect. We hadn’t even sold our own house yet, but we knew this was the place we wanted to buy.
It was an old farmhouse, spread out over three floors, each one as big as our whole house in the UK. It was located near Barga - once called the most Scottish town in Italy, and twinned with Longniddry, just down the road from where I grew up. It would be like a home-from-home, ideal for people just trying to settle in and learn the language. The estate agent had even gone to school in Edinburgh and knew the same bars we used to go to.
It came with a fair amount land, and a view - and, oh, what a view it was! It was just around the corner from where we’d been on our honeymoon, and you could practically see the cottage we’d stayed in. That had to be fate, right?
We knew just what we’d do with it too. It had previously been an artists’ retreat and a yoga studio, so it had plenty of rooms, and we could just knock a few walls down to have fewer, larger rooms. I’d spent hours poring over the floor plans, and worked out that moving the staircase round would open up the whole house and improve the flow. We could even convert the cantina into a large open-plan kitchen.
And the price was so cheap that we could buy it mortgage-free and still have enough left over for the renovations. It was perfect.
Except, of course, it wasn’t, because nothing ever is. The whole property was on a steep slope, so ground-level on one side was the first floor on the other, and planting anything in the garden would probably be tricky - there was a good chance anything you dropped outside might not stop rolling until it ended up in the stream at the bottom of the hill. We never saw the approach road either, because the Google StreetView car wasn’t able to get down it. It was about twenty minutes away from the nearest shop, along some pretty hairy roads, and an hour from Lucca, which meant two hours from Florence. This meant you couldn’t really go for an evening out in town and drive back, but we told ourselves that was fine because we’re homebodies really.
Obviously we couldn’t go see it straight away, as we were in the middle of the pandemic, but the estate agent was happy to do a virtual tour for us. The reception got a little dodgy at times, but everything we saw just made us more convinced this was ‘The One’. We made plans to come over and see it in person, because we’re not so crazy as to buy a house without seeing with our own eyes.
And then it sold.
At first we thought it was just the estate agent trying to pressure us into making an early bid, but no - apparently a local family had put an offer in, and it had been accepted. We couldn’t try to start a bidding war on a house we hadn’t seen, and we couldn’t get over soon enough to see it, so we had to let it go. Our own house wasn’t even on the market yet. Still, I couldn’t believe it - this was meant to be fate, wasn’t it?
I checked every day to see if it had been taken off the website yet, and held on to a glimmer of hope when I saw it hadn’t… until one day it was gone, and it was definitely over.
Every house after that was compared to this one. If we could get all that house for that low low price then, how could we go forward with another one that gave us less house for more money? Where would be the sense in that? That house was perfect (even though we’d never seen it, and it had some pretty obvious flaws) and nothing else would live up to the expectations it had set in my head.
This was our first lesson in the art of buying an Italian house: not to fall in love with a house too hard, too soon. We soon learnt that there’s so many beautiful houses in Italy, a bit like fish in the sea, or pizzas in Napoli.
